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200 years ago, on May 5th, was born in Treveris, Germany, the most formidable thinker of the modern era. Yesterday, his opposite number, The Wall Street Journal, had to admit, whit the motive of the inauguration of a monument in the city of his birth, that “the specter of Marx still harass Europe”. The work was financed by the People’s Republic of China, in a hypocrite effort to scare away a ghost who has already turned around the whole world several times, and has his eyes again in the country of the Great Wall. 

The world crisis which desolates capitalism since 2007, gave back to Marx a centrality in the academic and power circles that seemed in dusk since the declination of the great international revolt which begun in 1968 , and later, the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The official science could, at its best, describe the cycles of the capitalist economy, in no way show its historical decadence and it tendency to collapse. When it believed it had learnt all lessons from last century 30s’ collapse, it found itself again impotent to face, not say overcome, an explosion of a much larger range.  In a well commented lead article, the same North American newspaper had highlighted the relationship between the crisis and the “re-raise” of Marx, in an unnoticed recognition of the vitality of his revolutionary conclusions. A few weeks ago, Patrick Artus, chief of the French fund Naxitis, told a surprised Le Monde, that the world crisis could only be understood under the light of The Capital.

The capitalism propagandists had made, certainly, their best efforts to bury Marx along with the collapse of the so-called “real socialism” (Stalinism), especially with that famous “end of history” of Francis Fukuyama. The thesis went into discredit at full speed, when it was set clear that he had confused the beginning of the “era of freedom” with one of wars and massacres escalation of an unknown range since the end of the WWII. The refutation of the “real socialism” can only be read through Karl Marx, who already since The Manifesto of the Communist Party pointed out that in the epoch of the market and world economy, socialism could not triumph in just one country. The simple reading of the newspapers is enough to advert that the capitalism restoration there where it was expropriated by huge social revolutions, has reached insurmountable limits and unleashed catastrophic contradictions at world level. 

The militant

Karl Marx could develop the critic to the economy and the politics of capital, because he had assumed a position of active militancy against the existent order. Further on he would consecrate this posture in the most famous Thesis XI: it is not about interpreting the world but to transform it. He showed it with his preparatory political labor and his participation in the German Revolution of 1848, and, in general, in the European revolution of that year – “the springtime of the peoples”. The critic to the German philosophy must be read in this key. Marx militated in the European revolution from the position of a communist; even though he did it from the left wing of a bourgeois revolution. Consequent with his position that the proletariat must be a constant critic of its own movement, he modified this point of view, by verifying the cowardice of the bourgeoisie in front of its own historical duties. In a famous circular (of March 1850) he pointed out that the working class should intervene in the bourgeois revolution from a political independence position and with an own political party. From this evaluation raises the theory of the Permanent Revolution – the passage from the bourgeois revolution to the proletariat one. The vitality of this pose remained demonstrated in the ulterior century and a half, in one hand with the terrible defeats where it prevailed the followism to the ‘national and popular’ parties of the bourgeoisie, and on the other with historical victories, as it happened with, evidently, the October Revolution, and with the Chinese one and the Cuban Revolution. 

Once again, in his militant condition, Marx rejected the sectarian political construction, right away after the defeat of the European revolution, warning that the cohesion and the victory of a coming proletariat ascent would require to endow it with the necessary theoretical weapons. Is that so he contributed in a decisive way to the program and organization of the 1st International, which gathered together the main workers’ organizations of England and France, mainly. The International did not only proposed to organize the working class against the atomization promoted by the great bosses, but it assumed the political task of defending the independence of Poland against the Tsarist Russia, and to promote a revolutionary war against Tsarism.  The same happened with the revolutionary war that unleashed in the United States the secession of the proslavery South.

The 1st International, through Marx intervention, gave its explicit support to the North, leaded by Lincoln. Marx, once again, orientated himself in this historical range war, not as a bourgeois democrat but as a communist, since he wagered for the war against slavery would disembogue in a great agrarian revolution that could end in the collective property agenda, and the unity, on the one hand, of the white and black farmers, and on the other, the unity of the agrarian population of the south with the northern working class (the slogan of the Radical Republicans was “40 acres and a mule”, for the black people, that is the agrarian distribution). Marx puts into evidence here the political method that avoids the historical schematism and glimpses the leaps in history from the efforts of the exploited to finish their social condition. The condition pf possibility of these ‘exceptional’ variants, if they could be called so, is the splice with the capital world crisis. Is what much later on will put into evidence the October Revolution. Something similar could be said of Marx’s observation, about that Russia could, potentially, avoid a transit through capitalism, if the Russian agrarian commune spliced with a revolution of the European proletariat. 

The Paris Commune

The tendency of the proletariat towards a communist reorganization of the society, will be shown in the Paris Commune, when the working class of the capital of France takes the political power, facing the national treason of the French bourgeoisie before the German state, in the 1870/71 war, Marx warns the workers were forced to take charge of Paris without the adequate political preparation, but precisely because of it, along with the 1st International gave it a total and unrestricted support. As a balance of this historical experience, which operates as a political school for the coming generations, Marx goes back to his conclusion about the necessity of a strong party of the working class. But the commune is, above all, a gigantic teaching for Marx himself, who watches how the working class organizes its own power, not in the speculations field, but in the practice one. He aims like this to the armament of the working class –the only democratic form of transitional management of the national defense and the political violence – , the electability and revocability of the public charges, setting the top of the remuneration of the officials at the one of a qualified worker – that is, the debureaucratization of the State, which begin to stop being such as consequence of these changes. 

Workers’ Party, working class and socialist International, government of the workers: Has any of these tasks lose actuality? The defeats that Marx pointed as necessaries for a definitive maturing, the working class has suffered at great scale, including the social-democrat denaturalization and the Stalinist degeneration, after all its extraordinary attempts of proceeding to the social revolution. Is the historical balance that must do the workers and the working class organizations politically most advanced to retake a path that is most necessary than ever, and that won’t be a repetition of the past. Is at sight the enormous capitalist decomposition – poverty, super-exploitation, war, massacres, incessant crisis of the political regimes in presence, economical collapses and a tendency towards political authoritarianism and fascism. 

Rosa Luxemburg, murdered a hundred years ago, because of her socialist revolutionary condition, synthesized the humanity dilemma with the following concept: Socialism or Barbarism.